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Bardacious, comedies, Elizabeth Fais, Reduced Shakespeare Company, Rom-Com, Romantic Comedy, Shakespeare
Happy Bardacious Birthday!
Today is Shakespeare’s 449th birthday! If you missed last year’s Bardacious Birthday post on YA-spin adaptations of his plays, you can read it here.
This year I wanted to do a celebratory shout out for Shakespeare’s happy plays … the romantic comedies. Rom-coms, in the current vernacular
Shakespeare’s comedies are my favorites, shallow (but happily so) as that may be. Though I’m not alone, if you consider how long they’ve been hits … 400+ years!
When I was researching my post, Rom-Coms ~The Lighter Side of Love, I came across an article that claimed “Shakespeare was the first [author] to make rom-coms popular.” I don’t know if that’s true. But it sounds true, so I’m going to roll with it seeing how it’s his birthday and all.
The following is a list of Shakespeare’s comedies. I’m sure you’ve heard of at least a few, and maybe even seen a movie of one or two:
- All’s Well That Ends Well
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Love’s Labour’s Lost
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Pericles, Prince of Tyre
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- The Two Noble Kinsmen
- The Winter’s Tale
Forsooth! Formulaic or Fantastic?
I may be a huge Shakespeare comedy fan, but there are some who insist his comedies are formulaic. That he even “borrowed” the formula and used it over, and over, and over again. Whatever.
I love Shakespeare’s comedies for what they are — witty and fun. In their time, they entertained nobility and the uneducated common folk. In the same theater. No small feat, breaching a target audience gap that wide.
How now! A 16 Play Mashup!
Shakespeare was a man of his time, and if he were alive today he’d embrace the humor and whimsy of our modern world. Enter the mashup. It’s popular in today’s music, why not plays? The following mashup of Shakespeare’s 16 comedies was contrived by none other than the raucously irreverent Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC), creators of the Othello Rap…
The Comedy of Two Well Measured Gentlemen Lost in the Merry Wives of Venice on a Midsummer’s-Twelfth Night in Winter; or Cymbeline Taming Pericles the Merchant in the Tempest of Love as Much as you like it for Nothing; or Four Weddings and a Transvestite
Trust me. You don’t want to miss the performance of the comedy mashup…
Elizabeth Fais 
What a witty mash up of all the comedies! Loved it. Happy Birthday to a most prolific, humorous, and brilliant writer. 🙂
The Reduced Shakespeare Company is brilliant in their zaniness. They do “Titus Andronicus” as a Julia Child-like cooking show. Hilarious!
Happy Birthday Will! and thank you so much for those rom-coms. My favourite is The Taming of the Shrew (10 things I hate about you).
Elizabeth – great video!
The Taming of the Shrew is one of my favorites too. The old John Wayne movie “McLintock” was another variation on that story. I aspire to writing a good YA version of a Shakespearean comedy one day. Something to rival 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man. 😉
This is tres cool! Wish I’d seen the RSC when I was at high school, instead of having the English teacher I did. Would have transformed my interest. As things stood, the teacher I had managed to assassinate all interest I or anybody else in the class had in Shakespeare, semi-permanently… Picked it up later, eventually…
For me the two interesting things about Shakespeare is that (a) he was writing in a police state – which is what Elizabethan England effectively was – and a lot of his stuff was cocking a snook at the conventions; and (b) his plays weren’t written by William Shakespeare but by another man of the same name…(one of these points is untrue…) 🙂
A teacher can make all the difference in whether we love or hate a subject. I waited until college to take Shakespeare, and had the most engaging teacher. Our homework was to read the assigned plays, but in class he spent most of the time translating the bawdy jokes for us. It was a hoot! Who knew Shakespeare was so racy?
I’ve heard from more than one source that it is believed that an Earl of Something-or-Other was the true scribe of the Shakespearean plays, because it was beneath nobility to engage in the performing arts. I don’t dismiss these allegations, but since I was born on the same day as Shakespeare *the man* (and am a writer myself) I choose to ignore them. 😉
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